Gals & the Gallows: UC Sociologist Examines Women and Executions

University of Cincinnati sociologist  Annulla Linders has researched newspaper accounts of the executions of women in the United States from 1840 to 1930. With women put to death at a rate of about 2 percent that of men, the issue provides an interesting study of the intersection of women’s rights, gender and criminal justice, as well as the capital punishment debate.

Of the 60 legal female executions during the period she studies, Linders tracked down newspaper reports from at least 42 of them. She will make a presentation on her study on

Aug. 17

during the

American Sociological Association

annual meeting in Atlanta. Linder's study does not include executions of slave women.

Prior to 1830, there was little opposition to the death penalty. It was not until the 1840s that the first “vibrant” movement against capital punishment began to take hold. Linders notes that increasingly in the period after this, there was a "clash" between gender biases and capital justice when it came to executions of women. While the social system sought to retain its gender-biased roles, capital punishment became an arena where the so-called “gender blindness” of the criminal justice system became difficult to defend.  Traces of the 19th-century debate are still present in the topic today in an era where women face the death penalty far less frequently than men.

Among Linders’ key findings are:

• “Prior to the nineteenth century, judging by press accounts, women’s presence in the audience of public executions was unremarkable,” says Linders. “During the course of the 19th century, however, women came to figure with increasing prominence in execution accounts. As women were referred to, described, and otherwise commented upon in the press and elsewhere, the boundaries around femininity, respectability, propriety and emotionality were poked, stretched, spotlighted and otherwise examined.” The focus on women spectators in press accounts brought an aura of promiscuity and questionable respectability to the occasion, Linders says. Some examples from the journalistic accounts, Linder cites, are: An observer of an execution in 1846 noted the presence of a “large proportion of well-dressed females,” many of whom “might have looked better at home” (National Police Gazette July 25, 1846). Of the nearly 5,000 people who gathered to witness an execution in Kentucky of a 17-year-old offender “full one-half of them were ladies – ladies, too, apparently of respectability” (National Police Gazette June 19, 1847). The pending executions of Josiah and Elizabeth Potts by the State of Nevada prompted “quite a number of women….[to make] applications to the Sheriff for permits to witness the execution. Such morbid curiosity is difficult to understand,” wrote the Silver State on June 20, 1890.
  
  
• Although few, if any, states barred the presence of women by statute, the discretion given to sheriffs and prison wardens usually resulted in a de facto exclusion of women once executions were held in private, explains Linders. “How unusual it became to have women present during private executions can be surmised from not only the numerous reports of who were in fact present – the newspapers often listed the witnesses – but also the flurry of comments when women did participate,” Linders says. Once executions became private rather than public square spectacles, women attended almost exclusively as attendants and/or physicians recruited to aid women convicts. Linders points out that nine years into his term as warden of Sing Sing, Lewis Lawes remarked that “we have had but one woman witness in the death chamber. She was Nellie Bly, who represented a New York newspaper at the execution of Hamby. She was so overcome that we literally had to carry her out of the death house.”
  
  
• As the social climate increasingly characterized women as saints and as child-like, the execution of women “can be viewed as a cultural feat of sorts,” says Linders.  It required the convicted woman to be de-feminized. For example, the tabloid the National Police Gazette described Bridget Durgan, who was executed by New Jersey in 1867, as a "monster," a "hideous criminal" and a "she-fiend," in sharp contrast to her victim who was described as "the innocent and beautiful Mrs. Coriel" (National Police Gazette, Sept. 7 & 8, 1867). According to the New York World, Governor Roosevelt regarded a convicted killer, Martha Place, “as a convicted murderess, sexless and inhuman” (Feb. 4, 1899). In Cincinnati, the Cincinnati Post joined in a petition drive to keep Vermont from executing Mrs. Mary Rogers, along with others from across the Midwest. Claiming that the "innumerable petitioners" who had tried to save Rogers from the gallows had been unable to supply any argument for why she should be spared from execution other than the fact that she was a woman, the New York Times observed that "[e]ven that was true only in letter, for Mrs. Rogers did not deserve the name in any of its higher and better senses" (New York Times, Dec. 9, 1905). The Burlington Free Press, sharing this impression, speculated that the Vermont governor might have tried to stop the execution “had there been one spark of womanliness in Mary Rogers” (Dec. 9, 1905). Similarly, in counter to claims made by Maria Barberi’s supporters, the New York Sun asserted that Barberi was not “a good girl led astray by a bad man,” but instead a brutal criminal “inspired by a savagely vindictive spirit in a woman who had defiled her womanhood” (New York Sun, Aug. 6, 1895).
  
  
• The defeminization of women charged with or convicted of capital murder was accomplished in other less overt ways as well, says Linders, through the minute details whereby they were described. Such descriptions included features, expressions, demeanor, emotions, activities, dress and words spoken. Ann Bilansky, for instance, “seemed to be utterly devoid of all natural female modesty, and even of common decency” (Pioneer & Democrat, March 24, 1860). Maria Barberi (who escaped the death penalty at her second trial) was described by a letter writer as an “almost wholly undeveloped animal” (New York World, Aug. 3, 1895). One juror in the Martha Place trial called Mrs. Place “the hardest woman I ever saw,” which was contrasted with the “innocent stepdaughter” she killed (New York World, March 16, 1899). Other commentators referred to Martha Place not simply as “a savage” (New York Times March 18, 1899), but also as a “savage woman to whose repellent personality not a particle of the most mucilaginous sentiment can attach itself” (New York Press, March 16, 1899).
  
  
• The women’s rights movement joined in the debate by suggesting that woman could not be punished under a legal system in which they had no voice or role in establishing. Opposing the execution of Mrs. Rogers, the President of the Hamilton County Suffrage Association in Cincinnati, observed that the woman “is classed with minors, idiots and imbeciles under the law, and is, therefore, ‘irresponsible,’ and should not be amenable for any crime she may commit” (Cincinnati Post, Dec. 5, 1905). Critics countered by discrediting those who tried to prevent the execution of women as sentimental and hysterical.

Assisting Linders in this study was UC graduate student in sociology Alana van Gundy.